The importance of utilizing your CRM data through Salesforce Advertising Studio and integrating it with your Google campaigns could not have a stronger use case than for an e-commerce brand. The possibilities are exciting and potentially endless - assuming you have your data in nice tidy rows, of course.

But why?

Because a website that sells things to people will by its nature have a plethora of juicy data that you can use to educate and improve your marketing endeavors.

If you sell something to someone you could collect their email, postal address, birth date, billing information, gender, age, and the product(s) they purchased. Just these areas alone tell you who they are, where they live, and what they like. If they buy children's products you can also assume they have a family. If they buy that gold-plated diamond encrusted Rolex, you can assume they have a high income.

All of these data points can be segmented within Salesforce and used to create an Advertising Studio audience. You can quickly get these set up, schedule them to refresh every day at a set time, upload them to Google AdWords, and use within Customer Match as Audiences against your search campaigns.

You really should be using what you already know about your customers.

Here are three ideas to get you started:

• Gender Based Advert Copy
• Strategy for Customers who have recently ordered
• Sale Shoppers

Gender-based Advert Copy

Split out your purchase data into gender segments. Upload them to Google AdWords through Advertising Studio. Assign them to generic keyword campaigns and test writing advert copy and sitelinks specific to that gender. Land them on relevant pages within your website.

This is a great example for generic keywords which don't indicate anything more about the searcher such as 'black shoes' or 'blue jeans'.

Say you identify as a woman and have recently brought a lot of running gear from a website. The subsequent week you decide to buy new running shoes so you search for 'running shoes'.

What headline do you think she'd be more likely to click on?

Exactly. If you have the data about your customer you should be using it to inform your advert copy and site links!

By making your advert copy intuitive to your first-party data, you will increase your CTR because your ad is more relevant to your customer.

In non-acronyms, make your ads more relevant, Google will reward you with cheaper traffic.

Always run this test with a gender neutral advert as a baseline to compare CTR uplift against and always be conscious that gender is a fluid spectrum, not a male and female binary.

Recently Ordered

Create an Audience with daily refreshes that contains customers that ordered a product in the last four days. Apply this list to your brand campaigns and use a bid modifier of -80% to bid less for these users.

We ran this for a client who identified that 50% of their brand traffic through AdWords was from returning clients checking the status of their order. The money they saved from running this audience was pushed back into generic campaigns and used this budget to successfully drive more first time orders through the website.

Awesome hey? See, I told you it was exciting.

Sale Shoppers

Think strategically and build an audience that has people in it who only really shop with you when the sale is on or only buy reduced price products.

Overlay these audiences with your new product campaigns or campaigns which contain highly expensive items. Test excluding them from those searches with a -80% bid modifier. Why pay for someone to see your advert about your new $500 leather handbags when historically they only buy things when they have 40% off?

Test to see if this improves the CPA for your high-end campaigns. By excluding the bargain hunters who are just pursuing, you can save your budget to show those products to people who have higher personal budgets.

Furthermore, recycle this list for when your sale is on. Use it across YouTube with a Skippable 'We have a lovely sale - oh look at this handbag' video creative or send them out a Gmail ad - Let your customers know the bargains are coming!

As you have also already split out the data, you can also use these audiences across the Facebook universe with similar strategic plays:

Age Based based Advert Copy - Use them as source lists for the type of creative you show people. Overlay with Facebook's extensive targeting for further optimization.

Recently Ordered - Use this data as the source for suppression lists for your current live campaigns. Remember it will refresh every day through Advertising Studio and only includes people who have brought in the last 4 days.

Sale Shoppers - Use them as exclusion lists for new product ranges but then push them heavily for when your Sale starts. Also run Lookalike Audiences off them and drive new customers to your site.

That's all for now but it's certainly not an extensive list. We'd love to know how you get on with the above tests and if you have any further tactical plays!